At musical performances, if boredom sets in, the listener faces a limited palette of acceptable recourse. Should she interdigitate through the interminable aria, fix her gaze upon the slumping violinist in the back desk, or—the path of least resistance—simply fall asleep? For some time, when beset with concert boredom himself, the Norwegian contemporary composer Øyvind […]
Author Archives: Jennifer Gersten
… is a violinist and writer from New York and based in Sweden.
Posted inEssay
Clothing the Future
Drummers, as a species, are generally granted asylum from the dictates of onstage formal dress. Their counterparts in classical percussion, however, are not so liberated: When Mike Truesdell, then a graduate student in percussion at the Juilliard School, arrived backstage to a fall 2011 solo performance in a t-shirt, he was promptly asked to change. […]
Posted inProfile
I’m Not Doing Anything
It wasn’t Helga Davis’ idea to have a podcast named after herself. Nor was ending up on the radio in the first place. At WQXR, the most listened-to classical station in the United States, Davis is among a cohort of contributors—including violist Nadia Sirota, composer Nico Muhly, and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas—who conjure art both […]
Posted inEssay
Notes Towards A Movement
On November 24, 1963, two days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Leonard Bernstein conducted Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony with the New York Philharmonic on a nationally televised memorial to the slain president. Three days later, Bernstein spoke before an audience of 18,000 at Madison Square Garden, where he delivered his famous words: “This […]